Send Email, In-app, Push, and text messages add-a-message-in-a-journey

Journey Optimizer comes with built-in message capabilities. You can simply add, in your journey, a push, an SMS, an In-app or email message activity and define settings and content. It is then executed and sent in the context of the journey.

You can also set up specific actions to send you messages:

To add a message in a journey, follow the steps below:

Update live content update-live-content

You can update the content of a message (email, In-app, Push, SMS) in a live journey.

To do this, open your live journey, select the message activity and click Edit content.

However, you cannot change the attributes used in personalization, whether they are profile attributes or contextual data (from event or journey properties).

If you modified contextual data, the following error message will be displayed: ERR_AUTHORING_JOURNEYVERSION_201

If you modified profile attributes, the following error message will be displayed: ERR_AUTHORING_JOURNEYVERSION_202

Note that for the In-app activity, any changes can be made to the content while the journey is live, but In-app triggers cannot be modified.

Send-Time Optimization send-time-optimization

About Send-Time Optimization about-send-time

Adobe Journey Optimizer’s Send-Time Optimization feature, powered by Adobe’s AI services, can predict the best time to send an email or push message to maximize engagement based on historical open and click rates. Use our machine-learning model to schedule personalized send times for each user to grow the open and click rates of your messages.

The Send-Time Optimization model ingests your Adobe Journey Optimizer data and looks at user-level open (for email and push) and click (for email) rates to determine when your customers are most likely to engage with your messaging. Send-Time Optimization requires a minimum of one month of message-tracking data to make informed recommendations. For each user, the system will automatically pick the best time using the following scores:

The model varies whether you are talking about scoring or training. Training is conducted weekly initially and then quarterly. Scoring is weekly initially and then monthly.

This information is stored with the user’s profile and is referenced at journey execution to tell Adobe Journey Optimizer when to send your message.

Frequently-Asked-Questions faq-send-time

What can Send-Time Optimization do? How does it handle new profiles? Does it spread the send over a 6/12/24 hour window?

Send-Time Optimization tries to predict the best time to engage with customers and optimize open/click rates of emails. The score is in a format of 3*7*24 attributes for each profile. The 7*24 attributes describe the ranking of the predicted best time to send out emails to the recipient and 3 is for optimizing email open rate, email click rate and push open rate.

Where can I see the expected send time for each profile?

You can see the overall score in the Profiles interface. For each of the three sets of 168 scores, the ranks go from -83 to 84. The higher the rank is, the better time was chosen to interact with the recipient. Since you can define the start and duration of a journey, the best rank (84) may not fall into that time window. In this case, we recommend choosing an hour with the highest rank value.

What reporting is available?

Access your journey, click the View report button in the top right and select the Journey tab on the left. Read more

How does Send-Time Optimization data affect profile richness?

Send-Time Optimization adds the score/attributes to each profile but no new profile is created.

Activate Send-Time Optimization activate-send-time-optimization

Enable Send-Time Optimization on an email or push message by selecting the Send-Time Optimization switch from the activity parameters.

For email messages, choose whether to optimize on email opens or email click-throughs by selecting the appropriate radio button. Push messages defaults to the opens option, as clicks are not applicable for push messaging.

You can also choose to bracket the send times used by the system by entering a value for the Send within the next option. If you choose “six hours” as the value, Journey Optimizer will check each user profile and pick the optimal send time within six hours from the journey execution time.

What happens if the optimal time is outside the window?

Let’s take an example with the following setup:

A profile can have an optimal open time which is outside the window. For example, John’s optimal open on click is at 5 PM.

At profile level, there are scores for every hour of the week. In this example, the email will always be sent within the window. At run time, the system checks the list of scores within that window (3 hour window starting at 10 AM). The system then compares the scores for 10, 11 and noon and selects the highest. The email is sent at that time.